State of the RPG Union: Green Ronin

He doesn’t really say how they’re doing, but I guess it’s fine as they are forging forward with their licensed properties, doing Set 3 for Dragon Age and a bunch of stuff for A Song Of Ice And Fire, including a revised core rulebook to take advantage of the hype from Book 5 and the HBO series. Then besides two more DC Adventures books, they’ll put out some non-licensed Mutants & Masterminds things. That’s the long and short.

Here’s the real problem with all this…

With all of our licensed material, the thing to remember is that we don’t control the approvals process and this can affect our release dates. We do our best and so do our partners but sometimes patience is required.

My perceptions may be colored because I’m not interested in any of those licenses, but it just seems like being tied down 90% to licensed properties is risky – and somewhat less original, content-wise, than my fond remembrances of Green Ronin from the Freeport/M&M 1e days.

7 responses to “State of the RPG Union: Green Ronin”

To be fair Green Ronins MnM 3E line is not all that tied down to the DC franchise. In fact the DC stuff is actually the smaller side of the scale: In total there will be 4 DC books for DC, of which 2 have already been released. By Comparrision the Heroes Handbook & The Gamemasters Guide book have already been released for the non DCA side & they released a villain a week digital product line for the entirety of last year resulting in about 130 characters (or so i’m told). They are also releasing an adventures path digitally (though its been really slow going) & they are now on to the Power Set books (another digital release which comes out once a week exploring what can be done with different thematic power sets). They will be releasing the entire Villains project as a hardcopy book later this year & a Emerald City Source book later this year as well. So on the MnM front i wouldn’t say thats anywhere near 90% of the line being made up by franchised material.

Then you would have fallen foul of good old Negativity Bias: Negavity bias is the name for a cognitive/psychological phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative rather than positive experiences or other kinds of information.

Or if you prefer you could always go with the classic Confirmation bias if you prefer.

The fact remains that your Maths is way off.

DCA page count so far has reached 602 pages, over two books. With another 2 books as of yet unreleased, that would roughly be 1004 pages.

On reflection the non DCA stuff has produced 52 villain portfolios coming in on average 4 pages per release (which is me being conservative as it would undercut the team files which were triple that size). Then there are the two official books, plus the GM’s generator coming out collectively about 471 pages on there own. Then add in the Sentinels stuff, which is about 20 pages all up. Then add in the adventure paths which average about 60 pages.

It totals about 759 pages of non DC stuff already released & more coming out all the time.

So its 759 pages versus 602 pages. You may not count them as real products, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t. In fact they’ll all be coming out in collected edition later this year. Green Ronin no longer has the funds to do the major release schedual like they used to, the industry has moved on from that business model. Now they digital release first, as to keep up interest & then accumulate release in the next year.

“My perceptions may be colored because I’m not interested in any of those licenses, but it just seems like being tied down 90% to licensed properties is risky – and somewhat less original, content-wise, than my fond remembrances of Green Ronin from the Freeport/M&M 1e days.”

Your also remembering the height of d20 (DC heroe is M&M 3rd editon),

The thing is that a licence will make more $ than anything, as will revised editions. Proven licences like DC, Dragon Age, and SoIaF are far less risky than rolling the dice on a completely original project (for me this is what Kickstarter is for). Just think about how well Dresden Files did vs. Spirit of the Century.

With their licence arrangements I would have liked to see a Mass Effect game.